I have a lower tolerance for pain, so I’m grateful we live in such an age where I can open a cabinet, take a couple of pills, and resolve a headache in 30 minutes or less.
In 2017, I tore a small tendon in my left wrist. Being left-handed, I found the inability to use my arm crazy frustrating. For 6 weeks, I had to wear a brace that kept my arm locked in a specific position while the tendon healed.
Once immobilized, the pain of the damaged tendon was basically erased. However, the brace itself caused a lot of discomfort. I remember barely sleeping the first few nights as it felt like my skin was on fire.
Soon, the discomfort I felt was all I could think about. For perhaps two weeks, any idle time I had was occupied by thoughts of what had happened and how uncomfortable I was.
What added more to my discomfort was my inability to do my job. I had a job that required a lot of typing. If you’re a proficient typer, you know that one-handed typing is much more than twice as slow as two-handed typing. I resorted to a job-trade of sorts with my office manager who spent a lot of her time on the ten-key. I did her work (where I could) so she could sit at my desk and type as I dictated.
That was fun for about 15 minutes.
After a few weeks, I was at wit’s end. In frustration, I yelled at my boss one day which was uncharacteristic. Unfortunately, the expression of frustration didn’t end with him. I was impatient with almost everyone in my life. To be fair to myself, I wasn’t sleeping well which always shortens my fuse a little, but I tend to be a super patient person.
In short, I had allowed an injury to a small tendon to temporarily change who I was.
After about 3 weeks, an odd thing happened. I would sometimes take the brace off after I showered so I could dry my arm and clean the brace. I started noticing how much it hurt to take the brace off. Now, I still had the frustration of not being able to do my job, but the pain of not wearing the brace was greater than the discomfort of wearing it.
At the end of the six weeks, physical therapy was difficult, and I found relief by slipping my arm back into the brace I had hated so much. How was it that the object of my pain became the source of relief?
Why is it that the euphoria of victory seems to fade so much faster than impact of pain?
From the little I’ve read, psychologists seem to agree that we are wired to seek comfort. Perhaps that’s why the highs of victory fade, because they have the potential to contribute to our comfort whereas pain seems to be the opposite of how most of us define comfort.
We all know that at varying intervals we’re going to face difficult, painful situations. Knowing that, why are we so often blindsided when they come?
I subscribe to the idea that we’ll never know how we’ll respond to the big thing until it happens. I couldn’t have imagined how, at 14, I would respond to my mother dying. When the grief finally took hold, I hit the wall of my bedroom with my forearm and broke a forearm-length hole in the wall which I promptly covered with a Jurassic Park poster.
When I tore that tendon, I became a different person for a while, but when I injured my right hip flexor running on a golf course in Pennsylvania, I took being on crutches for two weeks in stride (pun). I even got to enjoy a couple of wheelchair rides in various airports.
Even though that particular injury kept me from running for more than two months while it healed, it had little impact on the rest of my capability to get things done, and it increased the number of times my kids were willing to get things for me so I didn’t have to. (Sympathy service.)
Can we be prepared, in some way, for when those emergent and difficult things arise?
While predicting our response is difficult, developing emotional resilience and having a strong support network are two crucial things that will make bouncing back and moving forward easier. Note that I didn’t say easy.
For a person who has had many surgeries in life, another routine operation may not be that big of a deal for them whereas even a minor procedure might be very difficult for someone who has never had any surgery.
The support network is often most important because emotional resilience is developed in the moments when it’s needed.
Our ability to avoid being blinded by the difficult things in life isn’t about avoiding difficult things. Sooner or later, they will come. All we can do is work on developing the capacity to face life’s challenges with grace for ourselves and leaning into being shaped by our challenges in ways we don’t and can’t expect.
These are the moments when we might surprise ourselves. It’s in our most difficult moments that we can grow, adapt, and face other difficulties in life with a little more poise.
No comments:
Post a Comment